Thursday, September 27, 2018

Listening to Queen Esther

Queen Esther on stage at The Holy Land Experience in Orlando, Florida. https://holylandexperience.com/show/unwavering-courage/

Back in May at the Holy Land Experience, one of the musical extravaganzas shown in the main auditorium was a theatrical telling of the story of Esther. If you’ve read the book of Esther in the Bible, you can see why the creative team might have been drawn to this story — it has the opulent setting of the Persian royal court, a storyline filled with twists and turns worthy of a soap opera, and a villain right out of central casting at Disney. The Holy Land Experience team made the most of these elements, giving us glittering costumes and outstanding choreography, and a score to rival a Broadway musical.

Esther’s story is all about the vulnerability of women in a world of powerful men. The story opens with a drunk King of Persia ordering his current wife, Queen Vashti, to appear before a court full of men who had been served all the wine they wished to “display her beauty to the people and the nobles.” She refuses, and the king and his nobles decide that she must be removed, because if Queen Vashti is allowed to defy her husband, then other women will also be able to get away with defying their husbands. Everyone agrees that replacing Vashti with a more compliant woman and sending out an irrevocable decree that men are to be the rulers of their households and women must obey their husbands is the perfect solution. Queen Vashti disappears from the story; she has been effectively silenced, along with any other women who might dare to defy their husbands.

But of course, a powerful man cannot be expected to sleep alone. The king’s commissioners are commanded to bring beautiful virgins for the King’s harem, where they are given “beauty treatments” and sent to the king’s bed, so he can choose the one who pleases him the most. It would be nice to imagine that the girls are all volunteers and what the king is most interested in is witty conversation, but I somehow doubt that. In any event, after a year of “beauty treatments,” Esther is sent in to the king, who is mightily pleased, and Esther soon takes Vashti’s place as queen.

There’s a subplot in which Esther’s uncle Mordecai foils an assasination attempt on the king, and then earns the enmity of the king’s favorite noble, Haman, by refusing to kneel before him. Like any good villain, Haman is determined to destroy not just Mordecai but everyone related to him, which means all the Jews in exile in Persia, and persuades the king to decree their destruction. Esther faces a choice: keep silent and be safe, because the King doesn’t know she is a Jew, or speak out and risk death for pointing out the injustice about to befall her people.

That’s where the Holy Land Experience stage show ends: with Esther’s dilemma and her courageous decision to go to the king. In the Bible, the story continues with Haman getting his comeuppance and ending up impaled upon the same gallows pole he had intended for Mordecai, and some bureaucratic wrangling over how to negate a command that legally cannot be negated. But on stage, the dramatic denouement comes when Esther stands before the king and tells her truth with operatic zest. It is a story of a woman’s triumph by daring to say, “enough,” whatever happens next.

The fact that the scriptwriters at Holy Land Experience chose the moment moment Esther decides to risk everything to speak the truth as the high point of the play strikes me as prophetic. I surely cannot be the only woman who thinks of her own visits with Mary Kay and commercials for Mabelline and Oil of Olay when the Bible lovingly describes Esther’s year-long skincare regimen utilizing oil of myrrh, perfumes, and cosmetics. This week, I suspect I am not the only woman picturing the descriptions of alcohol-fueled high school parties and the alleged behavior of Brett Kavanaugh when I imagine why Queen Vashti might have refused to put on her crown and parade before a gathering of drunken men. And I hope I am not the only woman who sees in Dr. Christine Blasey Ford the same courage Queen Esther displayed in speaking her truth in front of the powerful, even as those angered by her actions threaten her life and the lives of her family members.

But I also think that it might behoove us to go read the rest of the story. We might want to pay attention to how carefully Esther has to approach the king, to put him in a receptive mood, before she can speak her truth. We might want to notice that even as Esther names the terrible injustice Haman has perpetrated, she apologizes for disturbing the king by bringing it to him. And we might also attend to how the powerful man, after his fury at Haman subsides, explains to Esther that, while he heard her words, his hands are tied because he can’t simply overturn the unjust law. And how Esther must once again speak up to shame the king into finding some kind of solution. We love to celebrate Esther’s courage: are we also willing to acknowledge and condemn the arrogance, sexism, bigotry, and careless cruelty -- in both her time and ours -- that made it necessary?

In May, it struck me that the show seemed to assume that everyone in the audience was familiar with the story, and so did not need to be told how the story ended. But this week, with the country once more in the midst of yet another #MeToo moment and a president dismissing women who report sexual assault as liars and fame-seekers, I find myself seeing the Holy Land Experience telling of Esther in a new light. If you are tempted to dismiss the whole Brett Kavanaugh scandal as a “smear campaign” or you think the women you know are making a mountain out of a molehill, consider this: The Bible's book of Esther is also a #MeToo story. How many women need to speak up, to offer their truth at the risk of their lives, before we finally listen to them?